Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Organic Traffic Drop of 90% After Domain Migration
-
We moved our domain is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com on April 4th. It was migrated to https://www.metro-manhattan.com
Google Search Console continues to show about 420of URLs indexed for the old "NYC" domain. This number has not dropped on Search Console. Don't understand why Google has not de-indexed the old site.
For the new "Metro" domain only 114 pages are being shown as valid. Our search volume has dropped from about 85 visits a day to 12 per day. 390 URLs appear as "crawled- currently not indexed". Please note that the migrated content is identical. Nothing at all changed. All re-directs were implemented properly.Also, at the time of the migration we filed a disavow for about 200 spammy links. This disavow file was entered for the old domain and the new one as well.
Any ideas as to how to trouble shoot this would be much appreciated!!! This has not been very good for business.
-
Very hard to say what's going on Kingalan1 without a detailed analysis. You've done a domain and https migration at the same time. It could just be a result of the transition given Google will have indexed multiple versions of the same content. Give it some more time. After that, if things don't improve you'll need to do a detailed analysis to diagnose what the problem is.
-
Hi Donna:
Yes, on official domain change got processed via Google Search Console.
I ran a MOZ crawl of the site. Every URL including the home page has a domain authority of 1. Previously the DA of the home page was 23.
No wonder the ranking and traffic dropped of the cliff! Assuming redirects were implemented correctly, (they were) is such a drop in DA normal after a migration?
Thanks,
Alan -
Did you use google search console to tell google you were switching to a new domain?
-
Yes, 301 redirection was done. We only had a handful of 404 errors. At the start the process appeared to progress very smoothly. Ranking dropped on all URLs. Some important URLs experienced a lesser drop (say position 2 to position 10). Most pages dropped form say position 12 to 60.
No content was changed during the move. Only 2 changes were:
-Different domain
-Secure domain (HTTPS).The old domain was www.nyc-officespace-leader.com
The new domain is https://www.metro-manhattan.comActually the number of daily visitors has dropped from 80 to about 10. The migration occurred on April 3rd, about 16 days ago.
The number of impressions Google is serving us is gradually increasing. But because the ranking is so low, the number of clicks is low.
So your suggestion is to incorporate keyword rich content into pages that ranked well previously? Do you think this will revive ranking?
Is it possible that this drop is normal and that ranking should recover in the next 60-90 days?
Or should I be concerned something has gone wrong? -
Did you do 301 redirection to each and every URL?
Did you downloaded all the URL’s by signing in to your FTP or Cpanel account?
Did you change any content, meta tags or onpage elements?
Login to your google analytics account and export All Pages under site content. Compare the pages and find out if the pages are same for before site migration and after site migration is completed.
How many 404 errors did you receive in your google webmaster accounts. 404 errors will be generated if user’s click the url’s from google search or links present any where on the internet. Try to create an alternative page or redirect that to some other similar page.
You are saying that your traffic dropped from 1000 to 150. Did you checked which keywords ranking dropped, remain constant or improved, what is the landing page and ranking. 150 traffic that you are receiving are for the same pages that used to rank before or are new pages.
Try to find all the landing pages that used to rank for your important keywords, map your keywords to that URL and also try to add informational keyword rich content on the landing page that used to rank before website migration this may help in improving your rankings.
For more detail information read this Web Site Migration Guide - Tips For SEOs
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
My Domain authority dropped 9 points... Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this significant drop.
My domain authority dropped by 9 points and I haven't done anything differently since the last scan. What is going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infotrust20 -
How to measure traffic for a keyword
Sitting in Country A I want to see how much traffic a particular keyword receives in Country B. Whats the best way to do it? Also, will the search results differ if I am analyzing the above sitting in Country A viz-a-viz Country B. In other words, will the IP of the country I am making the search from play a role in the results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Domain Alias SEO
We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com, www.myproduct2.com, www.myproduc3.com
And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks0 -
Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales). My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead. Would you noindex this page or not? Any thoughts?0 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0 -
Server Migration, Does it effect SEO?
About to go through a server migration. My intitial thought is that a change in servers shouldn't really change my rankings. But I've heard rumors... Can a server migration change rankings? Why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thos0030 -
Domain expiration and seo
My domain name is free with my service with yahoo but it expires every year and gets extended automatically as I continue service, how does this impact my seo efforts? I've heard that the search engines prefer sites to expire in 3 years or more? Is this a fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0
